“To justify Vance’s continued promotion of what he himself had described as “rumors” that might not be true, the candidate’s staff on Tuesday gave the Journal “a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors.” But “when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.” Kilgore, who was “wearing a Trump shirt and hat,” said “she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.”
The “cat-eating rumors,” the Journal notes, “started with a post by a Springfield woman on a private Facebook page.” That account “turned out to be third-hand” and was “subsequently disavowed by the original poster, according to NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation.”
This is the sort of evidence that Vance apparently had in mind when he told CNN’s Dana Bash that his information about pet-eating immigrants “comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents.””